There are perhaps not many passages of the famous history in which its author's love of dramatic antithesis has displayed itself in a statement more likely to mislead the student. Because the change which took place in the relation of Ministers of the Crown between 1693 and 1696 was a striking one Macaulay cannot resist the temptation of describing it as though it were a final one. In 1693 Ministers in disagreement with each other, in 1696 Ministers in accord with each other--the suggestion of course being that they "lived happily ever afterwards." Certainly no one previously unacquainted with the facts would suppose from this account of them that the first politically homogeneous Ministry was a purely experimental one, and that the experiment was not repeated by William, and never even attempted by his successor, under whom the old system prevailed, though with gradual modification, throughout her reign; that on many later occasions in our history the men in the chief offices of the Government were to be found "caballing" and sometimes even "haranguing" against each other; and, in short, that it was not till far on in the next century that the idea of Ministers being men of like political opinions "bound together by public and private ties," and supported by a majority "arrayed in good order under them, and moving like one man at the word of command," became uniformly and permanently associated with the constitution. Yet this is in fact the case. The "lower political wisdom meeting daily exigencies by daily expedients" did not devise an arrangement calculated to endure for all time; and no one ought to have been more surprised than Macaulay if it had. It met a particular exigency by a particular expedient, and as that particular exigency did not uniformly recur, the particular expedient naturally did not at once stereotype itself in our parliamentary polity. The pure Whig Government of 1696 attained the object of its formation, namely, to carry out his war policy, and passed away. William's later ministries were of a mixed character; the ministries of Anne were partly Whig and partly Tory; and the political unity which prevailed in the Walpole Administration was succeeded by a return to the old practice under Pulteney. It was not, as has been said, until well on in the century that it became an admitted political axiom that Cabinets should be constructed upon some bases of political union agreed upon by the members composing the same when they accept office together.